Home entertainment systems, including television and media centers, are converging with the Internet and providing a large number of available sources. This expansion in the number of available sources necessitates a new strategy for navigating the media interface and making selections.
The large number of possible sources creates an interface challenge that has not yet been successfully solved in the field of home media entertainment. This challenge involves successfully presenting users with a large number of items (programs, sources, items, etc.) without the need to tediously navigate through multiple display pages.
The information bottleneck in present media guide interfaces is largely the result of the limits to user awareness. If users cannot see all of the possible choices at one time, or are forced to spend inordinate amounts of time and effort in order to gain awareness of same, then it is likely that opportunities will be missed. Mere novel interaction methodologies, such as moving in three dimensions through virtual space, or using physical gestures to control and adjust settings or processes in displays or devices, while useful, do not address this problem of the “awareness bottleneck.”